Hemingway makes love, not war

A Farewell to Arms has been called the best American novel to come out of World War I. Maybe. I can think of very few other American novels that are even contenders, though I can also think of several greater novels from European writers. Perhaps because United States was less involved in, and never devastated by the Great War.

A Farewell to Arms is actually more of a love story than a war story. It is after all a farewell to arms. In fact, the army that the narrator protagonist deserts is the Italian forces which Hemingway himself served with (although he never deserted and was awarded for bravery).

Now this not to run down Hemingway, one of my favourite authors, nor to denigrate the novel that made his reputation as the leading writer of his time. War is described in Farewell with a surface detachment and attention to telling detail that brings out the underlying emotions indirectly—Hemingway at his best. The opening two-page chapter about the coming and going of troops through the landscape is often quoted as a lesson in effective writing. The scenes of a soldier's life during war are vivid.

But the novel really comes to its point when Frederick Henry is wounded and meets nurse Catherine Barkley for whose love he is prepared to leave war behind.

Whenever Hemingway is accused of not creating credible female characters, Catherine Barkley is Exhibit A. In other novels Hemingway does create memorable female characters, I counter—like Brett in The Sun Also Rises and Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But in Farewell, why Henry falls for Catherine is a complete mystery. Their relationship seems built on nothing more than their being the leads in a novel, as far as I can see.

Hemingway does not let us into the characters enough for us to understand their feelings and, for once, his famed understatement fails to imply greater depths. Far from a wonderful romance, it seems a silly, trivial relationship. However, it does kick the novel into another direction, into the leaving of arms and eventually a tragic conclusion.

And at the end the master is again at the top of his craft, forging pages of indirectly felt anger, pain and loss that bear repeated reading.

— Eric

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